Getting Unstuck: Tools to Strengthen Our Mutual Aid Groups

Is your mutual aid group suffering from collective burnout and decision fatigue? Do you try to create shared power but end up with the same people volunteering for tasks over and over again? Are you getting stuck in the same fights and can’t figure out how to move forward? You’re not alone!

As our communities are increasingly attacked, neglected, and left behind by those in power, more people are joining forces and getting organized to close the gap and meet each other’s needs to survive. Mutual aid organizing is more crucial than ever, but the pressure of responding to mounting crises can strain our relationships, group formations, and collaboration. While we aspire to make decisions collectively and work in non-hierarchical ways, external conditions and group dynamics can make it hard to live out these values in our organizing. How can we create new ways of working together that meet the moment and help our groups move in alignment with their core principles?

In this workshop, we’ll offer tips and tools for communication norms, structure, decision-making and more to address common challenges we’re facing in our mutual aid groups. Using case studies, we’ll highlight the key lessons we’ve learned through years of organizing in and supporting non-hierarchical group formations. Together we will explore how building values-aligned practices and structures can create meaningful participation, shared leadership and accountability, and effective action. Through a Q&A and follow-up worksheet, you will leave with tools and frameworks to bring back to your org’s next meeting!

You’ll leave this workshop with:

1. Concrete tools and tips from our 2-hour curriculum
2. Zoom recording of our session
3. Worksheet to help you apply these tools

Access Info

• This is a 2 hour training on Zoom, with one 5-minute break. Presenters will share their screen with slides in written English throughout. We will not offer CART captioning, though participants are welcome to turn on Zoom’s automatic closed captioning feature. We’ll periodically ask participants to share responses and questions in the chat or on mic throughout the training. We will not be using breakout rooms.
• We’ll have a tech support person present during the training to support in real time with troubleshooting if needed.
• We don’t allow AI notetakers in our workshop spaces; however, you will receive a recording and slides from the session afterwards to support ongoing reflection and learning.

Pricing

We charge for our workshops along a sliding scale in order to support people attending with varying class backgrounds and access to institutional and generational wealth. If you have access to funds from an organization to attend this workshop (for example, a professional development stipend), we ask that you pay at one of the 2 organizational tiers in order to leave spots open for individuals who do not have similar support.

• Individual Tier 1 (Free): You frequently stress about meeting basic needs, have significant debt, are unemployed or underemployed, have no or limited expendable income.
• Individual Tier 2 ($30): You may sometimes stress about meeting basic needs but regularly still achieve them, may have debt but it doesn’t prohibit you from meeting most basic needs, are employed and have access to health care, and have some expendable income.
• Individual Tier 3 ($80): You can comfortably meet all of your basic needs, have access to savings, are employed with paid time off and regular access to healthcare, own your home or rent a higher-end property.
• Organizational Tier 1 ($100): You have access to organizational financial support (such as professional development funds) to attend this workshop, and the organization has an annual budget of less than $1 million.
• Organizational Tier 2 ($250): You have access to organizational financial support (such as professional development funds) to attend this workshop, and the organization has an annual budget of more than $1 million.

Refund/Cancellation policy

Please note that we do not offer refunds for our virtual public workshops. Everyone will receive a recording of the session and the accompanying slide deck after the workshop.

About Guiding Threads Collective

We are a worker-owned cooperative of organizers and facilitators each with at least a decade of experience working inside of and supporting mutual aid groups, non-hierarchical collectives, worker-coops, small non profits, and other movement organizations. 

Anna Krist (they/them) is an Oakland-based facilitator and artist who supports individuals and groups in building sustainable, equitable movements for collective liberation. They first came to facilitation as a student while leading peer health education classes in high schools. Since then, Anna has worked in and with a range of peer-based and non-hierarchical collectives, organizations, and mutual aid groups, including a peer counseling collective offering mental health support to folks of color, an all-volunteer anarchist archive, and various worker-owned cooperatives.

Janine Ko (any) landed in facilitation via the solidarity economy, as a part of a worker-owned cooperative in 2018, where they came to love and obsess over the inner workings of democratic and non-hierarchical organizations. They now work at a reproductive justice organization transitioning into worker self-direction, and outside of work have found political homes in abolitionist mental health and disability justice organizing in the Northeast. They also have farmed for four seasons on the north shore of Massachusetts.